Top 10 Article Banks
by Marnie Pehrson
An article bank is a web site where people can post articles for webmasters, ezine publishers, newsletter editors and offline publications to find and reprint. The writer's "payment" for having his or her article used is that the writer's byline, resource box and link will be included with the article.
In essence, it's free advertising for the writer and helps build link popularity to his or her web site. Since starting IdeaMarketers.com as an article submission site in December 1998, the number of article banks has mushroomed.
There are literally hundreds of them. But every article directory isn't of the same value to you as a submitter. Some receive little traffic. With the 1,000's of articles in these databases, your article is bound to get lost. A good way to decide which article banks to submit your articles to is to go to http://www.alexa.com and look up their traffic. A site with an Alexa ranking of 500,000 or less is receiving a decent clip of traffic.
The lower the Alexa ranking number, the more Alexa users visit that site. It's not a hard and fast determination of traffic because not everyone has Alexa's toolbar installed on their browser. But, it will give you a good general idea.
Is Traffic the Only Thing to Consider?
No. More traffic to an article directory doesn't always translate into more traffic for YOU. It depends on how that site features your articles, links to your site, spotlights you, and gives you exposure. We've found, for instance, that the longer an article stays on the home page of our site, the more traffic that article receives and the more click-through's the writer receives to his or her site. Google, for example, needs to make several passes over a page before that page is thoroughly indexed. Eventually, if an article is spotlighted for a few weeks, it will come up higher in search engine results.
For example, an article that stays on IdeaMarketers.com's home page for 2 or 3 weeks or longer will usually come up on the first page of search results for its title. A great percentage of the time it will appear in the number one spot on both Google and MSN for the title.
What about Duplicate Content?
There's been a bit of a scare online about duplicate content - having the same article on hundreds of different sites. The problem here isn't so much for the writer as it is for the publisher. Google takes the top handful of occurrences for an article and displays those on their search results. The rest get dumped into their supplemental index, which means they aren't going to get seen. For the web site running the article, this means that having articles that are on every Tom, Dick and Harry's web site is just wasting space and resources on the site - that is unless the site is one of Google's favorite article banks.
The article banks that have been around the longest, that have good PR rankings, and that are regularly spidered by Google will have a better chance of a top position for an article - even if that article is duplicated on other web sites. This especially holds true if the article is displayed on a main page of the site.
For the writer, submitting the very same article to hundreds of sites is a waste of time. Spend your time submitting articles to the top 10 article directories. If you want to submit to others, tweak the article enough that it's distinctive and then submit it to another 10 and so on.
Top 10 Article Banks
Here are ten of the most popular article banks on the internet, in alphabetical order:
www.amazines.com
www.articlealley.com
www.articlecity.com
www.articledashboard.com
www.articledepot.co.uk
www.articlefinders.com
www.certificate.net
www.ezinearticles.com
www.freesticky.com
And of course, my personal favorite:
About the Author
Marnie Pehrson
Entrepreneurial Strategies
marnie@pwgroup.com
